Matt Damon missed out on a cool $250 million dollar payday when he turned down the starring role in Avatar and director James Cameron can’t help but to laugh.
Cameron originally pitched Damon to star in the 2009 film and even offered him a 10% cut of box office profits, Damon revealed in 2021 while at Cannes Film Festival. Given that the film went on to gross over $2 billion, that would have equaled a payday of over $250 million.
“I will go down in history… you will never meet an actor who turned down more money,” Damon said at the time, according to Deadline.
In a recent BBC interview, Cameron was asked about the actor and he immediately erupted in laughter.
“He’s beating himself up over this and I really think you know, ‘Matt you’re kind of like one of the biggest movie stars in the world, get over it,'” Cameron said before explaining why Damon had to turn the film down. “He had to do another ‘Bourne’ film which was on his runway and there was nothing we could do about that. So he had to regretfully decline.”
Although Damon missed out on a chance to be in the first movie, Cameron is open to him appearing in a future Avatar sequel but he doesn’t plan on giving him the same deal.
“Must do it. We have to do it so the world is in equilibrium again. But he doesn’t get 10%, f*** that,” Cameron said.
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Monday’s sports events:
NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION
Cleveland 122, Utah 99
Philadelphia 104, Toronto 101 (OT)
Atlanta 126, Orlando 125
San Antonio 124, Houston 105
Minnesota 116, Dallas 106
Oklahoma City 123, Portland 121
Milwaukee 128, New Orleans 119
Phoenix 130, LA Lakers 104
Charlotte 125, Sacramento 119
NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE
Dallas 2, Columbus 1
Boston 7, Florida 3
Washington 4, Detroit 3 (OT)
Nashville 4, Edmonton 3 (OT)
Colorado 1, NY Islanders 0 (SO)
Buffalo 3, Vegas 2
Montreal 3, Arizona 2
St. Louis 5, Vancouver 1
(NEW YORK) — Sam Bankman-Fried, who is facing charges in the U.S. following the collapse of his cryptocurrency company, FTX, is willing to waive his right to deny extradition to the U.S., a lawyer for the disgraced cryptocurrency executive said Monday after a chaotic court hearing that did not go according to plan.
The lawyer expected Bankman-Fried to return to court at some point this week to make the decision official, at which time he would be flown to New York to face federal charges.
Bankman-Fried, 30, was arrested last week in the Bahamas after federal prosecutors in New York filed an eight-count indictment including allegations of fraud and conspiracy.
At a court hearing last week, Bankman-Fried declined to waive his right to challenge extradition to the U.S. However, multiple sources familiar with the matter told ABC News ahead of Monday’s hearing that Bankman-Fried had reversed his position and was prepared to waive extradition, setting up a move to custody in the U.S.
At a court hearing on Monday, however, Bankman-Fried did not waive his right to deny extradition as expected, instead asking to see a copy of the U.S. indictment and speak to his New York-based attorney. A phone call, in the presence of his Bahamian counsel, was approved by the judge.
Ultimately, Bankman-Fried agreed to waive extradition and clear the path for his transport to the U.S. for prosecution.
Bankman-Fried has been held in the medical ward of the island’s Fox Hill prison, after an application for bail was denied when a judge determined he was too much of a flight risk.
A U.S. government plane is waiting to fly Bankman-Fried back from the Bahamas, where he lived in a $30 million penthouse while running FTX until it collapsed in a $32 billion bankruptcy in November.
In addition to the criminal charges, Bankman-Fried faces related civil lawsuits from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
There are more than $8 billion in customer losses, said Gretchen Lowe of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency.
Some crypto traders, who deposited their savings on the platform, fear they may never get their money back.
John Ray, the new CEO of FTX, who oversaw the dissolution of Enron, told members of the House last week that FTX lacked corporate controls to an extent he had never witnessed, characterizing the company’s conduct as “old-fashioned embezzlement.”
“I’ve never seen an utter lack of record keeping,” Ray said. “Absolutely no internal controls.”
Bankman-Fried, in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in November, denied knowing “there was any improper use of customer funds.”
“I really deeply wish that I had taken like a lot more responsibility for understanding what the details were of what was going on there,” Bankman-Fried told Stephanopoulos. “A lot of people got hurt, and that’s on me.”
ABC News’ Bill Hutchinson contributed to this report.
(CHICAGO) — Students at a Chicago high school staged a classroom walkout Monday afternoon to protest gun violence just days after a shooting near their campus left two teenagers dead and two others wounded.
Students at Benito Juarez Community Academy in the Pilsen neighborhood on the city’s southwest side, left their classrooms and gathered around a makeshift memorial where Friday’s shooting occurred. The students called on city leaders to bolster security on their campus and crack down on gangs.
Many of the students released balloons into the air as they held a vigil for the victims.
“I want Benito Juarez to be safer because, honestly, I felt like this situation wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t a lot of gang activity around the school,” one of the student protest organizers, Kiya, told ABC Chicago station WLS-TV. “It’s scary for people like me, who are not gang-affiliated, that have to go to school every day and then wonder, ‘Dang, am I going to get shot?'”
Gunfire erupted around 2:30 p.m. Friday just outside the Benito Juarez campus, police said. Killed in the shooting were 15-year-old Brandon Perez, a Benito Juarez student, and his friend, 14-year-old Nathan Billegas, a freshman at Chicago Bulls College Prep, family members told WLS. Chicago police said both victims were shot in the head.
Two other teenagers, a 15-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl, were hit by gunfire and are expected to fully recover, according to police.
During a news conference Friday evening, Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown said the shooting occurred just as school was being dismissed for the day in staggered phases.
No arrests have been announced in the case.
“We are conducting a pretty aggressive investigation and all of our resources are being dedicated to insure that we bring these people to justice that caused this,” Brown said.
Police released a surveillance image Saturday of a person they believe was involved in the shooting, running away from the scene.
“I don’t want anyone to feel like they’re scared to come to school or anything, like, that’s why I’m doing it,” Kiya said of the planned classroom walkout. “I’m doing it for other schools, too, that have to go through this.”
Overall, homicides in Chicago are down 15% from 2021 and shooting incidents have also fallen 20% from a year ago, according to the latest Chicago police crime statistics.
(MOSCOW, Idaho) — About 10,000 tips have been submitted so far in the unsolved murders of four University of Idaho students, police said Monday, but investigators still don’t have a suspect.
Roommates Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen and Xana Kernodle, as well as Kernodle’s boyfriend, Ethan Chapin, were all stabbed to death in the girls’ off-campus house in Moscow in the early hours of Nov. 13.
Investigators are still combing through “hours and hours of digital content,” including surveillance videos submitted by residents and business owners, Moscow police said in a statement Friday.
“There is a massive amount of digital content to review with a robust team dedicated to handling digital submissions,” police said. “Other members of the investigation team are dedicated specifically to email tips, while another team is assigned to Tip Line calls.”
Among the videos under review is this surveillance video from a Moscow gas station that shows a white 2011-2013 Hyundai Elantra near the victims’ house when the crimes occurred.
Authorities are “confident” that the person or persons in the Hyundai Elantra has “information that is critical” to the case, Moscow police Capt. Roger Lanier said last week.
“We have many tips that have come in on the 2011-2013 Hyundai Elantra,” Moscow Police Chief James Fry said in a video Monday. “But what we’re asking is, anybody else who still hasn’t sent in a tip, if you own one or if you know someone who was driving one the day before [the crimes] or the day after, please send that tip in.”
Police have released this white Hyundai Elantra stock photo.
Police said the investigation won’t slow down over the university’s winter break.
Much of the case remains a mystery, including a motive and how two other roommates survived.
The surviving roommates, who police said are not suspects, were at the house and likely slept through the murders, according to police. They were on the ground floor while the four victims were on the second and third floors.
Lanier said last week that police “do have a lot of information” in the case that they’re choosing not to release to the public.
“We’re not releasing specific details because we do not want to compromise this investigation,” he said in a video statement.
Authorities urge anyone with information to upload digital media to fbi.gov/moscowidaho or contact the tip line at tipline@ci.moscow.id.us or 208-883-7180.
(WASHINGTON) — The House select committee’s 18-month-long investigation into the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, came to a dramatic close Monday when members voted unanimously to make multiple criminal referrals to the Justice Department over former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
In a sweeping 160-page summary released after the meeting to explain its findings, the committee labeled Trump as the “central cause” of the attack and listed four charges they recommended be brought against him.
The Justice Department is not obligated to act on such referrals to charge Trump, or even to acknowledge them. But the public hearings outlining Trump’s “multi-part scheme” to overturn the 2020 presidential election have amped up pressure on Attorney General Merrick Garland to bring criminal charges against Trump — which would be the first in history against a former president.
“We have every confidence that the work of this committee will help provide a roadmap to justice and that the agencies and institutions responsible for ensuring justice under law will use the information we provided to aid in their work,” Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in his opening statement.
Anticipating critics will deem any committee action as political, members emphasized how the referrals, while historic, follow the first time in history an American president refused a peaceful transfer of power.
“We understand the gravity of each and every referral we are making today, just as we understand the magnitude of the crime against democracy that we describe in our report,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md. “But we have gone where the facts in the law lead us, and inescapably, they lead us here.”
Here are some key takeaways from the final business meeting:
Committee refers Trump to DOJ on 4 criminal charges
After the committee’s nine members took turns describing what they said they uncovered in hours of interviews and thousands of documents, Raskin was the one to announce that the evidence “warrants a criminal referral, of former president Donald J. Trump, John Eastman and others.”
He listed four federal criminal statutes Trump and others allegedly violated: Obstruction of an Official Proceeding (18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)), conspiracy to defraud the United States (18 U.S.C. § 371), conspiracy to make a false statement (18 U.S.C. §§ 371, 1001) and to “incite,” “assist” or “aid and comfort” an insurrection (18 U.S.C. § 2383).
“We propose to the committee advancing referrals where the gravity of the specific offense, the severity of its actual harm and the centrality of the offender to the overall design of the unlawful scheme to the overall election compel to us speak,” Raskin said. “Ours is not a system of justice where foot soldiers go to jail and the masterminds and ringleaders get a free pass.”
Raskin pointedly said that “the starting point” of the committee’s analysis was how a federal judge in March already found Trump’s and Eastman’s pressure on then-Vice President Mike Pence to obstruct the congressional count of electoral votes “more likely than not” violated two of the statutes: obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States.
ABC News Chief Legal Analyst Dan Abrams, after the committee acted, said he would argue that Justice Department investigators doesn’t really want to deal with the criminal referrals “in an effort to remain apolitical.”
“They’re not going to take the legal conclusions of the committee and run with it,” Abrams said. “From their [the DOJ] perspective, if they were deciding, they might have said, ‘Don’t refer anything to us, please. You guys do your thing, we’re going to do our thing. We don’t want anyone to claim that the two are intertwined.'”
Highlight reel of Jan. 6 hearings
For Americans who might have missed some of the committee’s previous work, members played a montage of highlights from previous hearings and closed-door videotaped depositions to hammer home their findings that Trump was told he lost the election but pushed forward with an attempt to remain in power anyway.
That included a deposition from former Attorney General Bill Barr, who told the committee that he thought Trump’s claims of fraud were “bull****.” Also featured was deposition from former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who told the committee he described Trump’s last-ditch plan to install a loyalist to be acting attorney general as a “murder-suicide pact.”
Moments from Cassidy Hutchinson’s bombshell testimony were also played, including her comments about Trump’s desire to go to the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Footage of rioters breaching the Capitol obtained by the the committee was aired, along with photographs showing then-Vice President Mike Pence sheltering-in-place in the Capitol complex as the violence unfolded.
Cheney deems Trump ‘unfit for office’
Co-chair Rep. Liz Cheney focused on how Trump was the first president in American history to refuse a peaceful transfer of power and was blunt in belief that he should never be allowed to hold office again.
“January 6, 2021, was the first time one American president refused his constitutional duty to transfer power peacefully to the next,” she said in her opening remarks. “In our work over the last 18 months, the select committee has recognized our obligation to do everything we can to ensure this never happens again.”
Cheney said among the most “shameful” of the committee’s findings was that Trump sat in the dining room off the Oval Office watching the Capitol attack on television and resisted for hours issuing a public statement instructing his supporters to go home, despite urgent pleas from White House staff and lawmakers.
“During this time, law enforcement agents were attacked and seriously injured. The Capitol was invaded. The electoral count was halted, and the lives of those in the Capitol were put at risk,” Cheney said. “In addition to being unlawful, as described in our report, this was an utter moral failure and a clear dereliction of duty.”
“No man who would behave that way at that moment in time can ever serve in any position of authority in our nation again,” she added. “He is unfit for any office.”
4 Republicans referred for ethics violations
The committee is also referring multiple House Republicans to the House Ethics Committee over failure to comply with lawful subpoenas.
Those lawmakers are top House Republican Kevin McCarthy and Reps. Jim Jordan, Scott Perry and Andy Biggs.
“We asked multiple members of Congress to speak with us about issues critical to our understanding of this attack on the 2020 election, and our system of constitutional democracy. None agreed to provide that essential information,” Democratic Rep. Raskin said during the meeting.
“As a result, we took the significant step of issuing them subpoenas based on the volume of information particular members possessed about one or more parts of President Trump’s plans to overturn the election. None of the subpoenaed members complied,” Raskin continued.
There were a total five members who did not comply with their subpoena requests from the committee, the final being Rep. Mo Brooks. Brooks, who is leaving Congress, was not included in the list of referrals in the House Jan. 6 committee’s executive report.
But with Republicans taking control of the House and its committees in a matter of weeks, it’s unlikely the referrals will go far.
What’s next?
While this was the committee’s last big stand, a more comprehensive report of its findings and recommendations is due out on Wednesday.
“This committee is nearing the end of its work, but as a country we remain in strange and uncharted waters,” Thompson said. “We’ve never had a president of the United States stir up a violent attempt to block the transfer of power. I believe, nearly two years later, this is still a time of reflection and reckoning.”
“If we are to survive as a nation of laws and democracy, this can never happen again,” he added.
While the congressional committee disbanding at the end of the year, the Justice Department’s investigation into what happened on Jan. 6 will continue.
The department has separately conducted its own investigation for months, but it has not had access to the committee’s expansive evidence until this week.
While skeptical of the impact of the committee’s criminal referrals to DOJ, Abrams said the Jan. 6 committee’s work could be valuable going forward in what it documented via testimony and other materials from those around Trump and the Capitol rioters.
“So the referral aspect of this, I think, is much less significant than what the evidence has uncovered and the fact that now the special counsel seems to be moving so quickly,” he said.
(EL PASO, Texas) — The Texas National Guard has deployed a “contingency border force” of over 400 personnel to El Paso, TX, as the city continues to deal with a surge of asylum-seekers arriving at the border.
The Texas Military Department said the deployment is part of Governor Abbott’s “enhanced border security effort” and will include a Security Response Force comprised of “elements” from the 606th Military Police Battalion “trained in civil disturbance operations and mass migration response.”
A spokesperson confirmed to ABC News that these types of Security Response Forces are also sometimes dispatched to large protests, like those that rattled the country after the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, MN.
“The equipping of riot shields would be mission dependent and based on the situation in their area of operation,” the spokesperson said.
The move came hours before Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a temporary stay on an order that would end Title 42, a Trump-era health policy used over 2.4 million times to expel and prevent migrants from requesting asylum in the United States, citing the risk of COVID-19 spread.
In November, a U.S. district judge ruled that the policy was “arbitrary and capricious” and ordered it to end. A coalition of 19 states appealed that judge’s decision, now the Supreme Court will weigh that appeal, but it’s unclear when their final ruling might come.
El Paso saw a sharp increase of asylum-seekers in recent days leading up to the Title 42 deadline, with U.S. Border Patrol making over 2,200 apprehensions on average per day this month.
“Texas National Guard is increasing its posture along the border in response to high levels of illegal border crossings over the past week and the pending expiration of Title 42. The end of Title 42 is expected to lead to a massive influx of illegal immigrants, allowing criminals to further exploit gaps while federal authorities are inundated with migrant processing,” the Texas Military Department said in a statement before the stay was issued.
The Security Response Force is used to “safeguard the border and repel and turn-back” some immigrants, TMD said, adding that a second one will be on standby and ready to deploy to El Paso, or other parts of the border. The deployment is also part of a statewide effort to stem the flow of immigrants attempting to come into the country.
Texas Gov. Abbott is among the leaders that joined the appeal to prevent Title 42 from ending.
“If the courts do not intervene and put a halt to the removal of Title 42, it’s gonna be total chaos,” Abbott told ABC’s “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz before the stay was issued.
(LOS ANGELES) — A Los Angeles jury has found disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein guilty of three of seven counts, including one count of rape of Jane Doe 1, in his Los Angeles sexual assault trial.
The jury found Weinstein not guilty of one count — sexual battery by restraint of Jane Doe 3 — and it was hung on three counts, including forcible rape of Jane Doe 4. The jury will return Tuesday to hear arguments on special findings.
Weinstein, who is already serving a 23-year prison sentence in New York for criminal sexual assault and third-degree rape, was accused by four women of assaulting them in hotels between 2004 and 2013. He faced two counts of rape and five counts of sexual assault.
The 70-year-old former movie executive pleaded not guilty and has said all of the encounters were consensual.
Jane Doe 1’s lawyer, Dave Ring, said in a statement, “No victim should have to endure what Jane Doe 1 did the past five years after she came forward. Weinstein and his lawyers did everything they could to intimidate her and discredit her, and they failed miserably. Jane Doe 1’s life has been incredibly difficult since she revealed the rape in 2017; but she persevered and brought Weinstein down. We are all very proud of her.”
In a separate statement, Jane Doe 1 said, in part, “Harvey Weinstein forever destroyed a part of me that night in 2013 and I will never get that back. The criminal trial was brutal and Weinstein’s lawyers put me through hell on the witness stand, but I knew I had to see this through to the end, and I did.”
“I hope Weinstein never sees the outside of a prison cell during his lifetime,” she added.
Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón thanked the survivors in a statement following the verdict, saying, in part, “I stand in awe of their fearlessness. They deserve better than what the system has given them.”
“I also want to thank the jurors for their service during this lengthy trial and for examining all of the evidence carefully,” he said. “I am of course disappointed that the jury was split on some of the counts, but hope its partial verdict brings at least some measure of justice to the victims.”
Weinstein initially faced 11 counts in the trial, but four charges relating to Jane Doe No. 5, including two counts of forcible rape and two counts of forcible oral copulation, were dropped by the prosecution.
The four women all testified during the trial, including Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Siebel Newsom was referred to as Jane Doe No. 4 during the trial, but she has been publicly identified by her lawyer.
Over more than two hours of testimony, beginning Nov. 10, Siebel Newsom often broke down recalling the 2005 encounter with Weinstein at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills in which she said she was raped. Siebel Newsom, then an aspiring actress and currently a documentary filmmaker, said she accepted an invitation to a meeting with the producer at his hotel suite because “you don’t say no to Harvey Weinstein.”
“I was so violated and I don’t know how that happened,” Siebel Newsom testified about how she felt after the incident. “I didn’t see the clues and I didn’t know how to escape.”
Prior to the trial, Seibel Newsom’s lawyer, Beth Fegan, said of her client’s testimony: “Like many other women, my client was sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein at a purported business meeting that turned out to be a trap. She intends to testify at his trial in order to seek some measure of justice for survivors, and as part of her life’s work to improve the lives of women. Please respect her choice to not discuss this matter outside of the courtroom.”
The trial in Los Angeles came 2 1/2 years after Weinstein was found guilty of similar crimes in New York City, a landmark decision after the so-called #MeToo movement, in which powerful men were exposed for sexual misconduct, began largely around bombshell reports about the Miramax founder’s behavior in The New York Times and The New Yorker in fall 2017.
Weinstein’s lawyer, Mark Werksman, said in opening arguments during his LA trial that each allegation was a “weak and unsubstantiated trickle that will evaporate upon your close scrutiny.”
“The evidence in this case is based upon emotion, not facts,” Werksman said. “You will learn that the allegations can be traced directly to a movement called the #MeToo movement.”
Weinstein did not testify during the trial.
In his closing argument, Deputy District Attorney Paul Thompson said the witnesses testified “credibly,” even under intense cross-examination, and that the defense has the difficult task of arguing that every single woman who took the stand in the case is lying.
Defense attorney Alan Jackson told the jury in his closing argument that the evidence was “smoke and mirrors” and accused the women who testified of being “fame and fortune seekers.”
A Los Angeles jury has found disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein guilty on three of seven counts, including rape, in his Los Angeles sexual assault trial.
The jury found Weinstein not guilty on one count, and it was hung on three counts.
The jury will return Tuesday to hear arguments on special findings.
Weinstein initially faced 11 counts in the trial, but four charges relating to Jane Doe No. 5, including two counts of forcible rape and two counts of forcible oral copulation, were dropped by the prosecution.
The 70-year-old former movie executive pleaded not guilty and has said all of the encounters were consensual.
The four women all testified during the trial, including Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Siebel Newsom was referred to as Jane Doe No. 4 during the trial, but she has been publicly identified by her lawyer.
The jury took some 40 hours over 10 days to reach their decision.
The trial in Los Angeles came 2 1/2 years after Weinstein was found guilty of similar crimes in New York City, a landmark decision after the so-called #MeToo movement, in which powerful men were exposed for sexual misconduct, began largely around bombshell reports about the Miramax founder’s behavior in The New York Times and The New Yorker in fall 2017.
Weinstein is already serving a 23-year prison sentence in New York for criminal sexual assault and third-degree rape.
Shinedown is one of the hardest-touring bands in the world, and to explain why, frontman Brent Smith turns to the poetry of Taylor Swift.
In a Instagram post, Smith reacts to the question “Why are you touring almost 200 days a year?” alongside a video of him mouthing along to the lyrics from Swift’s hit “Anti-Hero,” off her new album, Midnights.
“It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me,” Smith-as-Swift sings while pointing at himself.
In the post’s caption, Shinedown teases, “Should we raise the touring bar even higher for 2023?” and invites followers to comment with their city suggestions.
Shinedown spent much of 2022 touring behind their new album, Plant Zero, which was released in July. The singles “Planet Zero” and “Daylight” both hit #1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart.
